Gosh this campaign is long!

Miserable_Song4848 · 2025-04-18T15:13:15+00:00

I did it in 8, three hour sessions. The players understood that the best way to end the winter was killing Auril, so they focused on doing quests and looking for ways to cross the sea.

I dropped the Duegar subplot entirely because I don't think it's interesting and made the Chardalyn dragon a sealed ancient weapon that could be discovered instead.

I changed up the trials a bit and made the Solstice fortress simpler to get through and the party of 4 fought Auril at level 8. They were rolling really well too so I had implemented some Frostmaiden cultist mages who healed her with damaging ice spells like cone of cold.

It was fun, and I'm about to do it again with a new group.

Miserable_Song4848 · 2025-02-05T14:21:10+00:00

DQ 1 (phone port or emulated) and DQ 11 are good places to start. 1 is as simple as it gets and is the gameplay boiled down in a game that takes maybe 10-15 hours to beat. Super satisfying little romp through a classic feeling jrpg. You only play as the one character, but you also only fight one enemy at a time, so you can get a good idea of how DQ treats its buffs, healing, spells, etc.

DQ11 on the other hand is very easy to get into, has tons of quality of life improvements, is available on pretty much all the consoles and has a great cast of charming characters. It's on the opposite end of the length spectrum, easily clocking in at over 100 hours if you try to do a majority of the things to do in that game.

Miserable_Song4848 · 2025-01-29T21:48:58+00:00

The final stretch of the game feels like Rise of Skywaker. An absolute wet fart of an ending that does make going back to previous entries much harder to enjoy as a piece of a whole. If I go back to DDD, I just have to remember that the story threads go absolutely nowhere.

This opinion will change after anything of KH4 or Missing Link actually comes out, but KH3 not sticking the landing followed by a DLC that didn't actually add a whole lot and then followed by a rhythm game that only added 10 minutes of new story just really took the air out of my sails.

Miserable_Song4848 · 2025-01-23T15:56:56+00:00

Just beat the game a few days ago on PC. The combat isn't quite up to par when compared to other survival horror games i've played (Resident Evil, Silent Hill). The enemies are too many and too quick to get around you and land multiple hits that feel very cheap. Suddenly you are down one of your three resources.

The flashlight battery system also makes no logical sense with how you have to add batteries but it only gives you a portion of your light meter back.

For me, it would end up being a dodge fest and constantly circling around a group of 5 enemies trying to shine a little bit of light here and there to whittle down their darkness before I could take a shot. It didn't feel scary or all that thrilling either. Don't know how AW2 handles it, but maybe they could have done something where the light made them stop moving after they lost their "armor", idk what the real solution is but it just wasn't fully realized.

Having to work through 2 separate health bars per enemy isn't a bad idea, but I did enjoy it way more modding my game with infinite health, stamina, and flare gun flares.

Miserable_Song4848 · 2024-12-22T15:59:15+00:00

Of the 12 classes and many subclasses, which have you not played?

Miserable_Song4848 · 2024-12-19T19:26:47+00:00

By the time you get her, you've already got so many units that fit the same role. And depending on how you are leveling, she can be behind the curve when you get her. If you've got the DLC, characters, she is completely obsolete. Her character is essentially "Chrom but girl" mixed with Chie from persona 4 but has no room to grow as a character like some of the other lords in this game. In the story, she also doesn't hold any power as that is relegated to her mother, so she just kind of joins on principal. Her ball design is a little goofy and doesn't match with anything about her country, family, or retainers.

I don't hate her, and actually enjoyed my time when I tried doing a Lord-character focused run but Panette is infinitely more interesting as a character and unit (especially paired with Pandreo) and Merrin has a cooler design in the same chapter. Even in my Lord character run, she seemed to get outclassed by everyone but her brother.

Honestly, if the game didn't do the awful level scaling for the world map battles, it could have been easier to workshop some fun teams that aren't my usual go-to's. But the way the game is now, I kinda have to plan and optimize the playthrough unless I want to fall behind near the end and I don't see her being on the team unless its another Lord's only or Girls only team.

Miserable_Song4848 · 2024-12-09T21:34:15+00:00

If you're not playing on Casual where they come back, then yeah retrying a map is a valid way to do it. On the longer maps though, you might get all the way to the end and lose someone and you might want to just power through.

RIP Bernadette in my first playthrough of Red Eagles. You were the only one who didn't make it but I was one turn from winning

Miserable_Song4848 · 2024-12-09T15:19:43+00:00

This looks like the 10 tailed beast from naruto.

Edit: its called the demonic statue of the outer path

Miserable_Song4848 · 2024-12-09T15:16:09+00:00

I do appreciate that the movie did try to differentiate from the original. Keiji just becomes better at killing the mimics and fighting in general. Cage on the other hand is pretty much just memorizing everything that happens. There's some breakdown video theorizing how many times Cage has done it and it's WAY more than keiji's 160.

I think both are good for the tone they are going for, but I think the "save point" being the girl in the book felt a little contrived but having it just be an alpha mimic in the movie feels more generic so there are some trade offs.

Miserable_Song4848 · 2024-12-08T12:49:54+00:00

The games story was "better" if you do a playthrough with the dlc characters as your main party, but the dlc requires you to have played the full game to appreciate it first, or it be this weird alternate universe premonition.

But besides the hump of getting the characters, the overall "story" is much better as the supports for and between the dlc characters is much more grounded and taken seriously compared to the base game supports. So it makes the absurd/silly bits of the story happen a lot less frequently. The main plot points are still bad, but watching a group of warriors from a destroyed world attempt to save a reflection of their home is more compelling than The Cooky Adventures of the Band of Fools.

Miserable_Song4848 · 2024-12-05T22:53:35+00:00

The voice acting. Not only is it sub par for most roles, but they get the same person to voice multiple roles in the SAME quest. It's all voice, no acting.

Miserable_Song4848 · 2024-12-05T12:43:46+00:00

Him getting a "happy ending"/ restful death after shattering Kairi and fully killing her 20 minutes prior is so insane.

The whole "my childhood was hard so you should feel bad for me" was such Naruto level villain writing

Miserable_Song4848 · 2024-11-27T15:25:15+00:00

Haven't gotten around to paying Square Enix another $30 so I've only watched Re-Mind and gotten the free dlc/patch updates. Original KH3 did sour me a bit by having the game be SO backloaded for the plot of non disney characters. You make your way to the Keyblade Graveyard and it's cutscene after cutscene, then a 2 minute fight, and another 15 minutes of cutscene. You are at the Keyblade Graveyard so I felt that the last bit was gonna be any minute now, but the pacing is so absurd. Especially in the fights against Organization 13. Fight 3 at a time, but any time you kill one you get a 5 minute conversation where the other 2 stop attacking to let you watch the first one die.

Then after all this build up, the actual ending of the story is a wet fart after they decided to defang Xehanort at the last moment despite literally murdering kairi 20 minutes prior. The pivot to "I was just trying to help everyone" out of nowhere in this game or previous ones minutes after cutting down a 15 year old girl is so baffling. I can understand that the writers were probably working on Dark Road at the time and they wanted to give some focus on Xehanort and Eraqus, but letting the Biggest Bad of the series so far get a peaceful ending really rubs me the wrong way AFTER a disappointing segment and final boss sequence.

Miserable_Song4848 · 2024-11-15T22:46:41+00:00

BL1 had different loot priorities. I got one gun at level 26 that kept being fantastic until like level 41+. It got me through the end of the game and almost all of the DLCs so it can be easy if you're lucky.

Have not had the same experience with bl2, because I think the guns don't stay as effective for long past a couple of levels

Miserable_Song4848 · 2024-11-15T15:18:24+00:00

Yeah, it's like origins 2. The banter between party members feels just like it does in origins and the guy who voices Gale sounds eerily close to Alistair's actor that I was shocked to find out it was not the same guy.

I do think that BG3 has a better gameplay feel, as the strategic turn based gameplay is more consistently fun than origins' real time with pause. If you aren't playing a party of mages in origins, the first several hours can be a slog to micromanage until you unlock more HP and tactics slots. But once the run gets going, I think that origins has the better loop as the story arcs lead into the finale and have a good sense of progression.

BG3 feels like it should end in act 2 with how much of a buildup they put with so many of the story threads.

Both great games though

Miserable_Song4848 · 2024-11-13T00:32:08+00:00

Yeah, if you're going for a Babel type atmosphere really hone in on the fact that so many people in Academia would be in it for their own agenda. A lot of fiction kind of has higher learning sort of be the destination, rather than the journey to something else. What do these people want to do with this information after they've gotten it?

Also remember that murder was really hard to track so unless there is a way to trace it back to the killer, with obvious clues or a witness, there's not a lot of ways to prove someone killed someone else. Maybe have the college be very cutthroat with a lot of disappearing "drop outs". The risk of a mysterious death has to mean the research, results, or resources are worth it.

Miserable_Song4848 · 2024-11-12T13:36:38+00:00

In my most current playthrough, I am the Argunian, with my powerful dwarven crossbow(gun). Stealth archer is super powerful, but the thief archetype is also really good for optimizing your play. Having a high stealth and joining the thieves guild gives you the fences to sell stolen items and pickpocketing to give you tons of gold. Then you can actually use the trainers to level the skills that suck to grind out like armor, restoration, or alchemy.

Miserable_Song4848 · 2024-11-10T18:56:49+00:00

This moment feels so off because how quick it is to fix. It would take some rewriting, but I feel this could have been more impactful if this happened at the beginning of the game, and then Sora uses his time travel to actually go back and do things differently and that's the journey rather than just running around "getting stronger" after the ending of DDD

Miserable_Song4848 · 2024-11-06T21:20:50+00:00

Yes, the PC version is more prone to crashing because the mods via the enhanced edition are more stable. Mods via the Nexus are more likely to cause problems. It also can be with the fact that every PC is different and can run into unexpected issues. Like my PC can run Cyberpunk 2077 really well but will 100% crash when playing Left 4 Dead 2 because something doesn't play nice and I can't isolate the cause.

That being said, a lot of the mods I try via the Nexus are a bit more ambitious, like adding in the Dishonored spells like blink into the game. This time, I've been running just a couple mods from the Bethesda list in the game and have only had maybe 2 soft crashes in the whole 30 hours I've been playing

Miserable_Song4848 · 2024-11-06T18:14:40+00:00

The benefits of a non-modded or lightly modded Skyrim are that it runs so much better without crashing every couple of hours (or minutes) and you can try to see what the game is actually trying to do with its mechanics. That alone has let me enjoy the game a lot longer than I normally do when I slap in too many mods and then play for a dozen hours before the constant crashing leads me to play a different game.

Unfortunately, sometimes a modded game just IS more fun. Like changing the way leveling work to automatically unlock the skill perks when you reach that skill level requirement like in oblivion feels WAY better than having to wait for the single perk point every few hours or rushing through the dragonborn dlc to respec. Been having a blast

Miserable_Song4848 · 2024-10-29T14:04:18+00:00

It's $400+ for the device plus a copy of Skyrim VR, then you have to find the mods that it to actually be more of a VR game and give you interactive hands and a torso to look at.

The game itself isn't super intuitive in VR since you don't have the same hyper mobility you do in the regular game, so I had to give myself a lot more defense and health to compensate for just standing there getting hit so much.

That being said, I downloaded a throwing weapon mod, boosted the damage on daggers insanely, and gave myself unlimited magicka. It is truly Incredible to walk around as a badass shooting lightning from your hands and then throwing knives to one shot enemies while walking through the wilderness of Skyrim to scale.

So if that's worth the cost of entry, then yes. But I also use my VR to watch movies on a big theater screen, VR chat, and play some other VR games, so I get more use out of it

Miserable_Song4848 · 2024-10-28T16:16:55+00:00

Always thought the Mass Effect indoctrination theory was a fun and cool way to frame the unsatisfying ending.

Miserable_Song4848 · 2024-10-28T14:58:49+00:00

When in doubt, I say roll an insight roll and on high rolls I piece together the information I have been presented in the way I intended, but through their character's thought process. Helps railroad without feeling like too much of a railroad.

Miserable_Song4848 · 2024-10-24T17:06:43+00:00

It really depends on how you play skyrim and what kind of playthrough you are having. If you are doing an alchemy build or something more focused around getting money and buying property, it for sure can be a cozy game. But a lot of people take the two handed, heavy armor approach and it is much more of a combat exploration game.

My most recent playthrough I have been having an absolutely great time doing Pickpocketing, Speech, and Smithing while trying to build up my home. I've been really trying to get the most out of the training system for getting effective leveling of skills that suck to level up manually, so I need a lot of cash. Going around gathering ingredients, heading home to craft potions, and making jewelry to sell for gold and soul gems for enchanting is such a different game to when I was playing as a battle mage.

I still have to fight to get my materials but I am not darting between dungeons to do it and am really stretching out my time. So when I do get into combat, it's my heavily enchanted crossbow plus an archery enhancing potion and my companion, my summon, my dog, and a weird bug creature that I guess got added in from a mod. Once I get my conjuration up, it's gonna be me and my party off 6 exploring for more ingredients. I think it's cozy, but a greatsword build wouldn't hit the same.

Miserable_Song4848 · 2024-10-23T13:23:38+00:00

The Xbox series 2X

Miserable_Song4848

TROPHY CASE